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SeAK: Secure Authentication and Key Generation Protocol Based on Dual Antennas for Wireless Body Area Networks

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Radio Frequency Identification: Security and Privacy Issues (RFIDSec 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 8651))

Abstract

The increasing interest in the usage of wireless body area networks (WBAN) in healthcare and other critical applications underscores the importance of secure communication among the body sensor devices. Associating an unknown device with an existing network without prior knowledge of a secret key poses a major challenge. Existing authentication schemes in WBAN are typically based on received signal strength (RSS). However, RSS techniques using a single antenna are susceptible to environmental factors and are vulnerable to attacks that use variable transmission power. We present SeAK, the first secure light-weight device pairing protocol for WBAN based on RSS obtained by dual-antenna transceivers utilizing spatial diversity. With spatially separated antennas, the RSS values from a nearby device are large and distinct, as opposed to those from a far-away device. SeAK exploits this effect to accomplish authentication and shared secret key generation simultaneously. We have implemented a prototype of SeAK on the Opal sensor platform with a 2.4 GHz compatible RF231 radio. We demonstrate that our protocol is able to achieve a 100 % success acceptance rate, securely authenticate a nearby device and generate a 128-bit secret key in 640 ms, as opposed to 15.9 s in other recent RSS-based schemes (e.g. ASK-BAN).

NICTA is funded by the Australian Department of Communications and the Australian Research Council through the ICT Centre of Excellence program.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For 2.4 GHz, \(\lambda \) = 12.5 cm

  2. 2.

    We believe that the use of specialised antennas like micro-strip antennas and button antennas as well as advances in wearable technologies more generally, will allow such levels of spatial diversity in the near future [8, 17].

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW, Sydney, Australia

    Chitra Javali, Girish Revadigar, Lavy Libman & Sanjay Jha

  2. NICTA, Sydney, Australia

    Chitra Javali, Girish Revadigar & Lavy Libman

Authors
  1. Chitra Javali
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  2. Girish Revadigar
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  3. Lavy Libman
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  4. Sanjay Jha
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chitra Javali .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer & Information Science, University of Alabama, Birmingham, Alabama, USA

    Nitesh Saxena

  2. Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi

Appendices

A Off-Body Set-Up

Fig. 7.
figure 7

RSSI variation for various off-body experiments

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B On-Body Set-Up

Fig. 8.
figure 8

RSSI variation for various on-body experiments

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Javali, C., Revadigar, G., Libman, L., Jha, S. (2014). SeAK: Secure Authentication and Key Generation Protocol Based on Dual Antennas for Wireless Body Area Networks. In: Saxena, N., Sadeghi, AR. (eds) Radio Frequency Identification: Security and Privacy Issues. RFIDSec 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8651. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13066-8_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13066-8_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-13065-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-13066-8

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